Jimmie Higgins eBook

Gradually he emerged from the misty regions of anaesthesia,
and realized that he was on a stretcher, and being
carried. He moaned for water, but no one would
give it to him. He pleaded that there was something
dreadful wrong with him, he was going to burst inside;
but they told him that was only ether gas, and not
to worry, he would soon be all right. They laid
him on a cot in a room, one of a long row, and left
him to wrestle with demons all alone. This was
war, and a man who had only a shattered arm might count
himself among the lucky.

So through a night and a day Jimmie lay and made the
best of a bad situation. There were two nurses
in this tent, and Jimmie, having nothing to do but
watch them, conceived a bitter rage at them both.
One was lean and angular and sallow; she went about
her duties grimly, with no nonsense, and Jimmie did
not realize that she was ready to drop with exhaustion.
The other was pretty, with fluffy yellow hair, and
was flirting shamelessly with a young doctor.
Perhaps Jimmy should have reflected that men were being
killed rapidly these days, and it was necessary that
some should concern themselves with supplying the
future generations; but Jimmie was in no mood to probe
the philosophy of flirtation—­he remembered
the Honourable Beatrice Clendenning, and wished he
was back in Merrie England. Also he remembered
his pacifist principles, and wished he had kept out
of this hellish war!

But his pain became somewhat less, and they loaded
him into an ambulance and took him farther back, to
a big base hospital. Here, before long, he was
able to sit up, and to be wheeled out into the sunshine,
and to discover the unguessed raptures of convalescence—­the
amazing continuous appetite, the amazing continuous
supply of good things to eat and drink; the bliss of
looking at trees and flowers, and listening to the
singing of birds, and telling other people how you
rode out on a motor-cycle to look for “Botteree
Normb Cott”—­what the hell was that,
anyhow?—­and ran into the whole Hun army,
and held it up for a couple of hours, and won the
battle of Chatty Terry all alone!

IV

One of the first persons Jimmie saw was Lacey Granitch,
and Lacey took him off to a corner of the park and
said, “You haven’t told anyone?”

“No, Mr. Granitch,” said Jimmie.

“My name is Peterson,” said Lacey.

“Yes, Mr. Peterson,” said Jimmie.

It was a strange acquaintance between these two, chosen
from the opposite poles of social life, and brought
together in the democracy of pain. Jimmie had
the young lord of Leesville down, and might have walked
on his face; but strange as it might seem, Jimmie took
towards him an attitude of timid humility. Jimmie
felt that he had betrayed him to a cruel and hideous
vengeance; moreover, in spite of all his revolutionary
fervours, Jimmie could not forget that he was talking
to one of the masters of the world. You might
hate with all your soul the prestige and power that
went with the Granitch millions, but you couldn’t
be indifferent to it, you could never feel natural
in the presence of it.